Modeling Collaboration Patterns on an Interactive Tabletop in a Classroom Setting

Interaction logs generated by educational software can provide valuable insights into the collaborative learning process and identify opportunities for technology to provide adaptive assistance. Modeling collaborative learning processes at tabletop computers is challenging, as the computer is only able to log a portion of the collaboration, namely the touch events on the table. Our previous lab study with adults showed that patterns in a group's touch interactions with a tabletop computer can reveal the quality of aspects of their collaborative process. We extend this understanding of the relationship between touch interactions and the collaborative process to adolescent learners in a field setting and demonstrate that the touch patterns reflect the quality of collaboration more broadly than previously thought, with accuracies up to 84.2%. We also present an approach to using the touch patterns to model the quality of collaboration in real-time.